Tze-lan Deborah Sang 桑梓蘭

Dr. Tze-Lan Sang

Professor of Chinese, Michigan State University

Tze-lan Sang's teaching and research focus on modern Chinese literature and culture.Her first book, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China (University of Chicago Press, 2003), sheds light on China's formative bourgeoisie's pursuit of modernity and cosmopolitanism since the early twentieth century by tracing the rise of a system of sexuality revolving around the heterosexual/homosexual binary, of which the woman-preferring woman is a crucial, contested link.

Other Author Publications

“The Modern Girl in Modern Chinese Literature.” In A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. 411-23.

“Feminism’s Double: Lesbian Activism in the Mediated Public Sphere of Taiwan.” In Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Yang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 132-61.

“Eileen Chang's Eighteen Springs and The Affinity of Half a Lifetime: A Study of the Popular Novel.” In Chinese Literary Theory and Popular Culture, ed. Peng Hsiao-yen. Taipei: Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, 1999. 677-705. [In Chinese]

Dr. Sang's Books

In early twentieth-century China, age-old traditions of homosocial and homoerotic relationships between women suddenly became an issue of widespread public concern. Discussed formerly in terms of friendship and sisterhood, these relationships came to be associated with feminism, on the one hand, and psychobiological perversion, on the other—a radical shift whose origins have long been unclear. In this first ever book-length study of Chinese lesbians, Tze-lan D. Sang convincingly ties the debate over female same-sex love in China to the emergence of Chinese modernity. As women's participation in social, economic, and political affairs grew, Sang argues, so too did the societal significance of their romantic and sexual relations. Focusing especially on literature by or about women-preferring women, Sang traces the history of female same-sex relations in China from the late imperial period (1600-1911) through the Republican era (1912-1949). She ends by examining the reemergence of public debate on lesbians in China after Mao and in Taiwan after martial law, including the important roles played by globalization and identity politics.

This title offers a systematic analysis of documentary films in Taiwan. Each contributor to the volume investigates the various aspects of the genre by focusing on one or two specific films that document social, political and cultural changes in recent Taiwanese history.